Trademarks and Servicemarks (“Marks”) are used in economic source signaling, and owners of marks often use the marks to indicate licensed, certified, or qualified third-party resellers of the mark owners' goods and/or services. Professional organizations (e.g., doctors, attorneys, engineers, accountants, etc.), consumer bureaus (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories and Better Business Bureau), and standards organizations (ANSI, DOCSIS) also use marks to indicate that products and/or services of third parties meet various requirements. However, mark usage is difficult to control by the owner of the mark when the qualifications of the third-party change, from certified to uncertified, i.e., when the qualifications no longer meet the various requirements.
Typically, the owner of the mark manually tells a reseller to stop indicating support/sales of the marked goods/services when the reseller no longer meets the quality standards or no longer has access to sell the marked goods or services. In a fixed medium, such as but not limited to paper telephone advertising directory books, the reseller may not be able to change the advertising until the next printing of the advertising book. However, digital networked media such as the Internet offer dynamic and immediate mark updating capabilities. Even with the dynamic updating capabilities, current trademark and service mark logo use on web pages is controlled by the owner of the web page, which normally would be the reseller. Thus, there is typically no way for the owner of the mark to automatically take away access rights to display the mark on the digital media such as a web page. Consumers using telephone directory advertising books generally do not consider the staleness of the printing of the advertising book in evaluating marks because there is no simple way for the consumer to discern that a mark shown in the book is no longer valid. Similarly, the delayed and manual mark updating system, even for marks used in digital media, allows consumers to be misled by stale and counterfeit marks on the Internet.
Thus, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.